


skip the bill

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: AU: Adam's mom loves him, But none on screen, Canonical Child Abuse, Gen, Good moms in shitty situations, Mostly what would have happened if Adam and his mom were a team, Parrish family home life, Sort of soft family feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-12 03:12:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11728290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: His mother lets her gaze rest on the fat, warped book of crossword puzzles that she uses to hide things from his father in and goes to it. It is a large print, 8.5 by 11, and it hides a multitude of sins — a cashier’s check from her mother that she’s saving for an emergency, a prescription for xanax she hasn’t filled yet, a phone number on a gum wrapper. He opens it up to where it wants to go, the fattest bookmark in the bunch, and unfurls the trifold with shaking fingers.There is a number inside that hits him low in the gut like a fist, but if Adam Parrish knows one thing, it’s how to take a punch and stay on his feet. It is perhaps a testament to his stupid willfulness that he looks at it and thinks,sicker dogs than these have gone to hunt.





	skip the bill

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends! I finished the book series about a month ago and have thought about very little else. I'm sorry if you're subbed to me for Other Reasons.

Midway through the summer after his sophomore year of high school, Adam Parrish came home from work to find his mother with her face in her hands. Adam made the first, obvious assumption, and approached her with the softest footsteps possible. His body was ungainly lately, stretching in ways that he’d yet to get used to, but even the attempt to approach quietly would let her know that it was him and not his father. 

“Mom?” he asked, when he was close enough to whisper. 

When Beth Parrish looks at him, there are no new marks on her face or upper arms — there is only a fading bruise in the shape of his father’s fingers near her elbow — but she looks devastated. 

“What’s wrong?” Adam asks. He wants to reach out and touch her, but they’re alike, the two of them. Touch, when Adam is at his worst and likely to flinch away, only embarasses him. When she wants to be comforted, she will initiate it. She taught him to do the same, years ago. 

“I got a letter in the mail,” she says. She has the same accent as his father, deep south and wholesome, but she it is more kindly in the warmth of her mouth. He reels a bit, but immediately rights himself. If he is to receive bad news, his preference is to get it from his mother. “From that school.”

She does not have to mention it by name. Adam feels his shoulders roll forward, defensive, but then she carries on. “They’ve offered you most of a full scholarship.”

Adam heart soars, but he is careful to leave his face, stiff as his mother’s hairsprayed curls, while he waits patiently. 

“They aren’t going to cover everything, though.”

Adam desperately wants to ask, he wants specific numbers so he can start calculating hours, but he can read it on her face that she doesn’t think it doable. Still, he has to know. “Can I see it?”

His mother lets her gaze rest on the fat, warped book of crossword puzzles that she uses to hide things from his father in and goes to it. It is a large print, 8.5 by 11, and it hides a multitude of sins — a cashier’s check from her mother that she’s saving for an emergency, a prescription for xanax she hasn’t filled yet, a phone number on a gum wrapper. He opens it up to where it wants to go, the fattest bookmark in the bunch, and unfurls the trifold with shaking fingers. 

There is a number inside that hits him low in the gut like a fist, but if Adam Parrish knows one thing, it’s how to take a punch and stay on his feet. It is perhaps a testament to his stupid willfulness that he looks at it and thinks,  _ sicker dogs than these have gone to hunt.  _

“Mom,” he says. Her hands are back on her face. “I would never ask you for this. You know I — I would’t.”

His mother’s face dimples in a way that Adam knows is a fraction of a second away from tears. When she speaks again, her voice is wet with the wellspring of tears. “My baby,” she says, in a punched out breath. Adam is a little at a loss. 

His mother looks at the front door of their trailer, even though they both know how unlikely it is for his father to come home this early. Adam is willing to go where the work is, and he’s been doing overnight stocking at the grocery store for cash under the table. He makes slightly less than minimum wage, but his mother had assured him that he comes out ahead this way, with all of it being tax free income, and not being constrained by the rules of work as a minor. It has the upshot of Adam enjoying several hours after work in relative peace with his mother, the two of them treating lunch like the evening meal, and then frequently being asleep when his father comes home. 

She pulls his hand to her by the wrist, and puts her fingertip to his palm. Adam’s posture immediately cracks straight up. If his mother is about to  _ write on his palm before his father is likely to come home,  _ what she has to say is something his father would probably break a rib for. He holds his breath. 

_ I,  _ she touches in one straight line, and presses her thumb down in the center of his palm to indicate a break between words. He does not interrupt her while she writes, taking a long time. In the end he is left with this sentence:  _ I thought we would leave him this year. _

Sometimes, when Adam takes too long to slide dairy products into the proper place from inside the milk cooler, his wet fingertips go numb and chilled, even as his torso floods with excess heat. He experiences that sensation, now. He stares at her a long time, while she folds his letter up, tucks it back into her book and puts the book back into the junk drawer. 

Adam has been pocketing cash hand-over-fist since summer started, not real money, but the most he’s ever had, and he’s been putting it away in a cereal box, trading in fives and tens for crisp twenties at the store when they start to pile up. He goes to scrape some cash out of it, two twenties, before he artfully hides the box under his bed again. Their trailer is full of hidden things, between the two of them. 

“I think,” he says, thoughtful, “we should go out to lunch today.” He taps his palm and hopes she understands, meaning to give them space for the things too secret to even be whispered in a home Robert Parrish paid for. 

His mother cuts a glance at the front window, where he can see her car, sad but well loved. His father keeps her on a strict gas budget, makes her make a case for it every time she wants a few dollars to go out, and she lives in constant fear of an emergency. Adam swallows down his own selfishness and says, “I know. I have a few dollars for your tank, too.” 

She lets him drive.

He doesn’t get to, often. He doesn’t even have his permit, actually. Mainly he takes cars on quick laps around the park when he’s troubleshooting them, trying to see if he can recreate problems the owners describe, or making sure he’s fixed them, on the tail end. 

Adam parks imperfectly in the side lot of the Golden Corral in Henrietta and isn’t particularly embarrassed when his mom pokes her head out of her rolled-down window and redirects him so she has the space to get out. 

It takes fifteen minutes after they’ve settled in with plates for his mother to bring it up again. “It was easier,” she confesses, “when you were younger.”

“Because he was happier, then?”

“Because it was easier to keep from you when he lost his temper. And when I couldn’t, or when you got caught in the crossfire, he would buy you new things or take you out to the park after he’d been nasty, and it seemed easy for you to bounce back.”

Adam flickers through memories of lego expansions and a new football, of his dad bringing him to the reptile expo an hour outside of Henrietta. He’d bought him an axolotl and Adam had kept it in a little gurgling five gallon tank in his room for a year before it swallowed a pebble and keeled over. “You said… you’ve never talked about leaving him before.”

His mother’s face flushes, and they both fall silent when the waitress comes by with a pitcher of water to top up their glasses. Adam accidentally thanks her twice in his haste. When the waitress is gone, his mother says, “Well. I thought it went without saying, son.” 

Adam blinks. “Did you?” 

Her eyes narrow at him quizzically. “I have done a much worse job than I thought, Adam Parrish, if you didn’t know that. I’m your  _ mother. _ ”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“That I love you. Of course I’ve been trying to figure out what to do for years now.”

“You never let me — ” he says, grasping, feeling himself grow hot under the collar, after all the years of scuffles he’s been in with his father, and his mother comforting and shushing him in the same breath. He is out in public with his mother; he does not want to make a scene.

Adam pushes his chair back to get another plate, mostly to get away from how awkward and terrible he feels having this conversation with her. She is not at the table when he gets back, but she sits down shortly after he does, and munches loudly on a half-plate of celery while he composes himself. 

“I’m sorry if I ever...” his mother says. They’re not emotional people, but he can see she that she is making the effort for him. “If it didn’t seem like...”

Adam doesn’t make her finish. He holds up a hand. “Okay.”

“I’ll always be on your side,” his mother says, reframing the negative that she couldn’t seem to wrap her mouth around. “And with you getting older, it seemed like the right time, but if you’re going to Aglionby—” her voice drops when she says the name of the school. Adam personally doubts that no one that  _ goes  _ to Aglionby has ever stepped foot into a Golden Corral. “— then you’re going to have to put everything you’re making into what that school doesn’t cover.” 

His mother lets silence fall at the table over the muzzy background hum of the building. There aren’t many other diners, just lunch stragglers. 

The realization bites through Adam like a shotgun recoil. “I won’t,” he stutters. “I don’t.” There are so many ways that sentence could end. Among the things he  _ doesn’t _ : want to be the reason his mother stays with his father, want to be in charge of making that choice, have to go to Aglionby. 

His mother shrugs. “You’re sixteen, and you got into a good school. I assume it will help you get into a good college.”

Adam swallows. “The best.”

“Worth it?” his mother asks.

Adam doesn’t know. 

She adds, “I know you have big dreams.” 

“I’m sixteen,” Adam says. 

“You’re sixteen,” she agrees. “Too young for me to ask you to choose. I’m sorry. I think if I was a better mother, I would kidnap you and take you to my mother’s.”

“If I weren’t here, would you stay with him?” 

His mother pulls apart a dinner roll in her hands. “I don’t know. Probably. Some days I think  _ yes,  _ and love him, and some days I am perplexed that I ever think that. Love is terrible that way.” 

You can get used to almost anything, Adam thinks, misery slick inside of him like an oil spill. His mother is used the a secret prescription and crushing up an emergency xanax into a milkshake for his father when he’s on a tirade, used to dividing up the times where they get along and the times when he is cruel, and relying on mood congruent memory, used to having to justify leaving the house for a few hours to get some fresh air. 

Adam does not want any of that for her, and yet,  _ Aglionby.  _ He’s been going through interview after interview, paperwork and more paperwork, scholarship applications and medical forms, all year to secure this spot. Adam himself is used to a laundry list of things. 

It would be nice to live in relative peace with his mother, but he feels like he would have to put his future on the chopping block to get it, decline the Aglionby offer and help his mother keep them afloat. Nothing is fair. “Two years is not a very long time,” Adam croaks. 

“If we leave, I would probably need you to help with bills. If we stay… well. We stay. You know what that entails. Do you want to wait it out until college?”

When Adam gets out of school, Adam is going to make sure a lack money is never a reason to do anything she doesn’t want, that she will always have access to enough gas money to get her over the border, any border she wants to put behind her. 

He feels sick with selfishness as he says yes. 

*

The problem with hating his father was that he also loved his father, and that both of those things were true, although in the heat of the moment, he might find one but not the other completely true. Most of the time he live with the terrible swirling imbalance of it all. 

Once, during that same summer, after Adam had come home exhausted from an overnight, he and his mother had turned on Turner Classic Movies. Adam had made it about twenty minutes into Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House before he’d started to drift, and he’d ended up with his head in her lap, her fingers moving idly through his hair. 

His father had woken him up by coming home, which meant it must have been after five, maybe six. Shit, he’d lost  _ hours,  _ he thought, his body filling rapidly with dread. He weighed his options in the space of a camera-shutter and kept his eyes closed, not stirring. 

“Beth,” his father said, and he sounded gruff but not angry. 

“Hello, dear,” she said. Her hands had previously gone still but then moved again, touching the hair at his temple before stroking a finger along the ticklish curve of his ear. 

“I brought home dinner,” Robert Parrish said. “Do you want to rustle Adam up?” 

“Let him sleep, he can have some when he wakes up,” she said, indulging in his fiction. He might actually pretend to be roused sooner, rather than later. He can tell that his father has come home with pick-up fried chicken, and seems to be in a pretty good mood. “He had a long shift.” 

“He works hard,” his father said, and Adam was pleased. 

His mother stroked a fingertip from his forehead down his nose. “He favors his father,” she said. 

His father fixed his mother a plate and he could feel the heat of it as she held it, hovering an inch above his head. He knew she was tempting him, letting him know what he was missing out on so that he had all of the available information. 

“He’s pretty like his mama,” Robert said, not hatefully. Adam wondered what his mother’s face looked like just now. He did not often witness tender moments between his parents. He wondered if his mother saw this other side of his father often, and had wanted to show it to him just now. It was only in the last few years where tensions had mounted between him and his father, as if the testosterone levels in the home had hit some sort of critical mass. 

*

When Ronan Parrish smashed his father’s face it, Adam had thought, miserable, that this was the moment. He had been forced to take responsibility for choices before, terrible options where neither seemed like the right thing to do. Now, he would have to make another. 

The women of Fox way had said as much: inaction was as much of a choice. A cop was asking him if he was drunk, and why had Ronan attacked Robert Parrish.

He was going to have to be brave. On the one hand, Ronan’s life, which he’d done such a good job of making a mess of, going completely to shit because he stepped in for Adam. On the other, his mother, who had said  _ probably,  _ a year ago, when he had asked her if she would stay with him. 

His mother who had always been steady, who encouraged him not to lash out. Lapsed protestant, who could still recite that part of Corinthians,  _ love is patient  _ and the rest. What would she want him to do? Would it help her or hurt her? Fuck, Adam thought savagely, and opened his mouth, and croaked. 

“Drunk?” his mother was suddenly saying to the cop, her voice climbing. “My son has been  _ assaulted  _ by his father, that’s why I  _ called. _ ” And then, more scathing than he’s ever heard her, “Is this your first day on the job?”

Robert Parrish was suddenly vivid again, but the chastined cop stepped deftly between them. 

Adam and Ronan looked at each other, Ronan looking like shit but still exhilarated, probably flushed with happiness and adrenaline. Adam broke his gaze — it was hard to look at him, so smug when Adam felt like he was looking at a funhouse mirror of unbelievable things, like he had tricked himself and when he looked back at his life, it would all be as he left it. 

They take his father away. He says thank you to Ronan, which is clumsy, and not exactly what he wants to say, and then she drives him to the hospital. 

He worries about the bill the whole time, but his mother shrugs blankly at the number. “I am going to do my best to ignore it,” she says. He wonders if she means just for tonight, or forever. After they get home, he sits with his mother while she cries indoors, not exactly huddled, but shoulder to shoulder, and he passes her tissues methodically. In the corner of the living room, there is a milk crate full of books, a rotating lineup that his mother swaps in for credits at the paperback trader near where she gets groceries. Adam thinks about his mother making sure he has crime fiction and feels blank inside. 

By the time morning has come, they are left with this one truth:

“I am going to press charges on your father.”

“It’s not too late,” Adam says, eyes burning at the mere thought, but he doesn’t want to be selfish anymore: “You could stand by him. I could press charges, if you wanted.”

His mother scowls. “Adam Parrish, it is  _ my turn  _ for an emotional breakdown, so I don’t need you losing your mind right now. You can have the next turn. Your father will kick you out regardless. Where would you even  _ live? _ ”

His pride feels like glass, brittle and cold, even as he imagines it. “I could stay with Gansey.”

“Letting a man be in charge of your living arrangement is what got us into this situation,” she says, and Adam does not feel like arguing that it’s not like that, that Gansey’s not like that. 

When Robert Parrish gets five years with the possibility of parole after three, Adam and Beth Parrish both cry. The reasons why are complicated. 

Adam — well. He always works best with a timeline.

**Author's Note:**

> come hang out with me on [tumblr](katiewont.tumblr.com) because i think of little else right now except all permutations of the gangsey kissing all other members of the gangsey and i haven't made any trc friends yet. 
> 
> other google docs I have open today:  
> \- blue/adam had the meeting after dc gone differently (i.e. blue talks about her kissing problem and they get creative)  
> \- ronsey fic where gansey is very gone on ronan and very pissed off at kavinsky  
> \- noah is afraid of the dark so he's going to have to bunk with ronan  
> \- gansey/adam bodyswap for cabeswater reasons


End file.
